Building a Winning Real Estate Team: Lessons from Jeremy Bourgeois

Dylan Silver (00:00.96)
Hey, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show, I have Jeremy Bourgeois. Jeremy is a Marine Corps veteran turned real estate investor in St. George, Utah. Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Jeremy Bourgeois (00:17.283)
Hey, thanks for having me on, man. I really appreciate it.

Dylan Silver (00:20.05)
Absolutely, I always like to start at the top. How did you get into the real estate space?

Jeremy Bourgeois (00:27.461)
So I was on my way out of the Marine Corps and I had a friend who he was getting into it himself and he told me all about it. He was really excited about it. And so I started looking into it myself because I needed to know what the next thing was going to be for me. And I wanted it to be just as exciting as the stuff I was doing before. after just looking into it, was like, yeah, this is going to be the thing that I’m going to do. That was about

Six years ago, and I haven’t haven’t looked back since that’s been it’s been my primary thing now

Dylan Silver (01:00.82)
Okay, so your first wholesale deal, was that when you got out or was that as you were transitioning out?

Jeremy Bourgeois (01:06.583)
No, was pretty shortly after I got out. I got out and then I went just full on into wholesaling and also I bought a rental property as well. So I was doing a couple different things.

Dylan Silver (01:19.66)
Okay, you, was that your first time being a landlord at that point in time, or had you done this previously?

Jeremy Bourgeois (01:26.657)
Nope, first time with everything, kind of just went the shotgun blast approach. I did, I helped my friend with fix and flip. I was doing that rental property, you know, buying that. And then we were turning over the units and I was also wholesaling at the same time. So we were learning a little bit of everything at once.

Dylan Silver (01:47.252)
Okay, so let’s talk about the learning process. So the Marine Corps teaches you a lot of things. It does not teach you about creative finance and real estate, right? So you’re going out on your own, and I’m imagining people are saying there’s probably, just like in my experience, there’s some people saying that’s a great idea. Hopefully you had more of those people than I had, but I had a lot of people saying this is far out, right?

Jeremy Bourgeois (01:55.899)
Correct.

Dylan Silver (02:09.961)
So as you’re getting out, are you then just hitting the ground running with learning everything that you can or in preparation for getting out, are you arming yourself with as much education as you possibly can?

Jeremy Bourgeois (02:22.115)
Yeah, last year I spent, I really locked in and just decided to start listening to Bigger Pockets every day. So I was listening to an episode of Bigger Pockets per day. was reading every day and just really trying to educate myself before I got in. And I think that really helped prepare me, mostly mentally for some of the challenges that I was going to face now. mean, nothing can really.

fully prepare you because there’s always gonna be curve balls that hit you in real estate. But it certainly prepared me because I was learning from other people’s experiences. So that helped quite a bit.

Dylan Silver (03:01.356)
So time that you’ve been full time, how long have you been full time in real estate right now?

Jeremy Bourgeois (03:07.595)
For the past two and a half years or so I’ve been full in. I was actually full time when I first got started, but that first learning curve, we had some deals closed and I got my first flip. But with all that going on, that drained all of my money. So I did go back to a W-2 for a little while. I picked up a serving job, hated it.

I got right back into real estate about three months later or into remodeling. it. I started a remodeling company, which I only I had for about a year. But that also helped me in flipping. It gave me more knowledge on how to GC projects and do that aspect of things as well.

Dylan Silver (03:57.974)
So that first, you mentioned that first wholesale deal and getting that rental property to where you are today, what was that time period roughly? How many years?

Jeremy Bourgeois (04:06.235)
First wholesale to getting the first rental property.

Dylan Silver (04:10.176)
No, first wholesale to where you are today. How much time period was…

Jeremy Bourgeois (04:13.15)
okay. So that’s, that was 2020. So we’re looking at about five years.

Dylan Silver (04:18.124)
five years. Okay, so very interesting here. to our listeners who are maybe on in a similar position, maybe military or you know, unrelated field in the private sector working for government, you’re like, I want to break into real estate. In Jeremy’s story, which I can relate to, there’s bumps and bruises along the way, right? You do a flip, you’re out of money, got to go get a W-2 job. I was gonna go be a bartender a couple months ago until I ran into a deal, right? And I was still considering it and then

Here I am on this podcast, it just kind of best of both worlds. And so for me, what I found most tricky, and I’m curious what you found most tricky for me, the trickiest thing was talking to the sellers, the homeowners, where I was targeting was a fair degree of distress, distressed homeowners, for one reason or another, right? And then also understanding the contracts, because I don’t have any attorneys directly in my nuclear family didn’t have friends who were involved in this.

So it was totally a new language to me. I’m curious, did you feel any of those pressures as well?

Jeremy Bourgeois (05:21.995)
yeah. I mean, my first, my first phone call was an absolute train wreck. I had no experience, you know, doing any kind of sales before I jumped into it. And, one thing I learned really quickly is that wholesaling is a very front facing, you know, you’re talking to people pretty frequently. and you’re talking to them about, know, they’re one of their biggest investments that they probably not made, if not their biggest investment, which is their home.

or maybe one of their rental properties. So that was a big learning curve for me, but now I do it. It’s been a while since that first call. So now I get on the phone with people and it’s no big deal. But back then it was quite the challenge.

Dylan Silver (06:10.688)
What’s the scale of your operation today? How many people are you working with? How many deals are you doing on average? Where are we at today?

Jeremy Bourgeois (06:19.247)
So I run a pretty small business. We’re a lean, lean, mean company here in Southern Utah, but we work a little bit in different markets around the country. So I do some wholesaling in different states as well as here. Right now we’re probably closing about two deals a month. And I’m doing just JV deals with other people in my market here. I’m doing deals that I’m procuring through my own marketing.

channels and I’m really doing, you know, probably about for every four deals that we’re closing, we’re keeping one of them. So we’ll, I’ll do a fix and flip or we’ll do a land flip or a rental property, something like that. That’s kind of the ratio that we like to keep it at.

Dylan Silver (07:06.988)
This is phenomenal. I love this so much. This is such great work. mean, to talk about five years, career field that’s totally unrelated, right? Military service to then being able to have your full-fledged fixin’, excuse me, wholesaling operation, keeping some of these deals to build that, to build a portfolio, right? I don’t know, you may have mentioned, are you still doing some fixin’ flips? Are you still doing fixin’ flips?

Jeremy Bourgeois (07:31.609)
Yeah. yeah. Yeah. We, still love, you know, I love wholesaling, but I also love the other aspects of real estate as well. And, you know, if you, the good thing about wholesaling is if you find a great deal and if it’s in your market, you know, you can just take it down yourself. You don’t have to, pass off those potential profits to another investor if you can take it down yourself. So.

Dylan Silver (07:53.526)
Yeah, that’s the best position to be in to be able to say I intend to buy this and then one way or the other it’s getting bought whether it’s by an investor by yourself. Yeah, that’s the best position to be in. I got to get some deeds in my name or an LLC that I own. I’m trying to get to your level Jeremy but when I talk about kind of the life or career path of a real estate investor you’ve been effectively able to fast track it. I’m sure five years doesn’t seem like

Jeremy Bourgeois (08:06.125)
Absolutely.

Dylan Silver (08:21.086)
it was super fast like there were bumps and bruises along the way. But I know from personal experience and from seeing people who’ve been doing it way longer than and they’re not at your level, right? That it’s it’s pretty outstanding results. But for the career path of a real estate investor that I’ve been able to see, you go from being on the outside looking in, you mentioned bigger pockets, listening to educational material, networking events, which I want to ask you about kind of strategic relationships that you’ve created, going from there to wholesaling.

I’ve seen a lot of people then get into fix and flipping, which you mentioned again, Jeremy, from fix and flipping short term rental or any type of rental, which you mentioned. And then from there, I’ve seen people go into hard money lending, note buying, super creative things that I’ve heard like a second position liens acquisition, distressed. I was like, very interesting. And then from there, I’ve seen people go, my podcast guest earlier today was hospital development.

and medical spaces, just like incredible the life trajectory of a real estate investor. When you were getting out of the military, transitioning into this new career path, were you thinking like five, 10 years down the line or were you thinking like six months down the line, I gotta be a professional wholesaler and I gotta get there?

Jeremy Bourgeois (09:29.221)
Yeah.

Jeremy Bourgeois (09:43.737)
I was thinking, you know, with the angle in mind, which was to just get, you know, in the beginning, before I had rental properties, I thought that rental properties were, was a passive game. And you figure out pretty quickly that it’s not, it’s not a hundred percent passive. You know, even if you have property management and place on a rental property, there’s still things that you have to deal with, you know, capital expenditures, stuff like that. But really the, started with

the end goal in mind that was really important for me to make sure that I could be taking steps every day to get there. And financial freedom was probably the biggest driver for me. But I knew that to start finding more deals and finding good deals, I’d have to look off the market, off the MLS. And you can still get good deals on the MLS. But I found quite a few deals off the MLS just directly between

myself and the homeowner. And I’ve found that that way you can lock in much better discounts on properties. And that way allows you to build a portfolio of good properties a lot quicker, I think. So that’s kind of what we started with.

Dylan Silver (10:58.966)
Yeah, I mean, acquiring them off the MLS, I believe is the go to method, but it does require I had a mentor, Frankie, who said it’s a combat sport, which is kind of what I agree. Like it’s it’s contact, you know, you’re you’re in order to get in these off market properties, you might have to go hit some doors with a, you know, trespassers will be shot sign. I’ve seen that before, right. And I’m sure you have more stories than we can possibly

Jeremy Bourgeois (11:09.945)
Yeah, you’re right.

Dylan Silver (11:27.788)
discuss here and here in the podcast, but I’m curious, Jeremy, so you’re you’re you’re involved in a number of activities day to day right now. What are your lead funnels right now? And how have how has that grown since initially? Are you are you cold calling people? Are you you know, foreclosure reports? Where are you finding your your deals right now?

Jeremy Bourgeois (11:50.393)
Yeah, so cold calling has worked. Historically, that’s been my best, you know, my bread and butter. That’s where we’ve closed most of our deals. I have cold callers who are doing the calls for me. So I’m not doing it myself, but they will generate those leads for me and they’ll send the leads over and basically my role in them. And that is to go look at these leads, figure out are these good qualified leads.

or and should I follow up with them and at what frequency should I follow up with them and get that deal closed? Or are they just garbage? You they’re not really motivated because, you know, in wholesaling, you’re typically looking for motivation. That’s the biggest thing that you’re looking for. So, you know, we’re sorting through that stuff primarily through cold calling, but we also have leads that are coming in through our website.

And I do JV deals as well. So a little bit of a couple different marketing sources.

Dylan Silver (12:52.044)
Okay, cool. in my head, I’m thinking a lot of cold calling, you’ve managed to create a team around you. Are they VA’s virtual assistants? Okay, which I guess pivoting here a little bit. Have you found that there’s specific region or area of the world that has better VA’s?

Jeremy Bourgeois (13:00.677)
Yes.

Jeremy Bourgeois (13:10.683)
you can’t beat, you can’t beat American callers. they’re expensive, but the problem is, the problem is if, if you hire callers that are based out of like maybe Egypt or India or something like that, where, know, you’re paying a very, very cheap wage, they might call someone who is a good lead, but because they have a heavy accent in their voice,

you know, they might just hang up right away. So I think it’s less about the region of the world and more about how heavy their accent is or the absence of an accent, I should say. So that’s really important, I guess, to not have that accent present because that way people will carry on a conversation more frequently.

Dylan Silver (14:03.04)
Jeremy, we’re delivering, we’re delivering value to all the new wholesalers out there. Don’t give away all the game here, but feel free to defer some of these questions if you don’t want to answer. in your business, you, have you, it sounds like maybe sticking to American cold callers because of that lack of accent. So then they’ll be able to kind of stay on the phone longer for somebody.

And is that where you’re at today with the with American callers?

Jeremy Bourgeois (14:36.429)
Yeah, yeah, we use people, you know, we’ll, we’ll, use American colors and yeah, it’s, it’s more expensive, but we’ve gotten much higher quality leads from it. So, you know, our cost per lead will be more, but the quality per lead will also be much more. So let’s say for example, we’re calling a list in Salt Lake city and there’s five other people calling that list.

Now the likelihood that those five other people have other agents who have heavy accents is very, very high. So if I’m calling that same person that the other five people are calling and that person is a good lead, they’re more likely going to be more receptive to my callers because they don’t have that accent. can converse like you would with your neighbor instead of, you know,

Because I’m sure you’ve talked to someone from another country where they don’t understand the American conversational isms, and it’s just not really that enjoyable. So you get you get a much different quality. And, you know, it’s that that’s what I’ve seen. But it’s it’s not the approach for everyone because it is more pricey. So

Dylan Silver (15:55.336)
I have, well first let me say, I as a wholesaler myself think that this conversation is niche, but it’s so critical to hear, other wholesalers to hear, right? How often, I don’t know, but how often do people talk about the accents of their cold callers? Like this is utterly critical. Like if you’re not gonna be doing it yourself, you need to understand that this is your time, this is your money, and yeah, to your point Jeremy, it’s gonna cost, know,

maybe three times as much, maybe more, right? But you’re going to get higher quality engagement, which is going to turn into, you know, results, right? How are how are you finding good people on the phones? How are you able to find cold callers?

Jeremy Bourgeois (16:43.675)
so we we’ve done a couple different things. I’ve, and honestly, it is one of the most challenging things is to get a cold collar and keep them. because cold collar calling is a pretty brutal job. and most people, you know, most people who are very good at it move past the, the, you know, I guess the rank of, of cold collar pretty quickly to, know, whether it’s sales manager or, or whether it’s doing something on their own.

so I’ve used, I’ve used companies, you know, VA agencies to do that for me. I have also built teams myself, but that’s more, I’ve done that with, through, through those other countries because, and I’m not just saying, I’m not just saying about the foreign caller thing. you know, I guess just to say it, but I’ve had experience with it. I’ve built a team, of Philippine cold collars where we had.

Dylan Silver (17:18.528)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Bourgeois (17:41.039)
for people dialing and it’s, you know, they’ll burn some leads. It’s for sure. Even with training. you can absolutely build a really solid team. think honestly, I think if you’re hiring VAs that do have accents, which you can do and you can see success with it just through a volume based approach, it’s important to have a lot of training with them. And I personally, if I was to do that,

again, I would probably keep them in house and train them myself. But you can hire agencies to do that as well. I found that I found a pretty solid agency who works with my my my callers. And they do a good job. But it’s really it’s really less about the agency or or or even just the hiring the whole car in the beginning. It’s more so of keeping the

the caller happy, know, or hiring someone who’s really good and keeping them happy and stable employment because it’s really easy to lose someone who’s good in this game.

Dylan Silver (18:52.364)
100 % I agree with everything you said I’ve experienced that myself I’ve had a VA’s in the Philippines I actually learned to speak a little bit of Tagalog which is their I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it right Tagalog but it’s one of their native tongues out there and honestly one of the things that it gave me appreciation for is as Americans we know one language sometimes and if you ask us to cold call

Jeremy Bourgeois (19:02.871)
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Bourgeois (19:13.903)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (19:21.224)
And as you mentioned, Jeremy, it’s very difficult to keep people. First of all, it’s three, four times as expensive, but also difficult to keep people because then they see the graduate to the next thing. You know, I’ve said this before in other podcasts. One of the greatest things about America is this idea that anybody can accrue. And this is just me being blunt. Anyone can accrue vast wealth specifically in real estate. Anybody can. You don’t have to have a specific background or even

traits that are like from birth. can acquire these traits. At the same point in time, anyone can get wealthy in real estate. And so for you to kind of to bring people on, these people will quickly realize, hey, let me go do this on my own. And so I actually feel like I came from that. I first started out working for a company and I realized, hey, I can do this. Maybe I can do this better, right? And

That’s how it happens. So it’s a double-sided sword, specifically in the real estate game. I’m curious Jeremy, what your perspective is kind of on that when it comes to training new people. I’ve seen in many cases, wholesalers hold almost like behind a lock and key the secret sauce. What do I mean by that? I’ve seen wholesalers when they bring people on and they have an organization, they don’t wanna tell them about the contracts.

They don’t want to tell them about interacting with with title. They don’t want to tell them about you know transaction coordination in general and my perspective just personally and selfishly has always been I’ll give everybody all the game and still most people are not going to take it to that next level because it does require you to get hit in the face a lot and you you have to want to go out and do it. What’s your perspective. Are you more than along the lines of the look.

I don’t want to create competition for myself or are you more like let’s give everybody the opportunity to grow if they want to grow.

Jeremy Bourgeois (21:22.659)
Yeah, I’m an open book. You know, I’m the same way I think as you and I agree. think I could I could teach people all day long about how to to wholesale and how to close deals. But the reality is that the percentage of the people who are going to take that and run with it is very small. And, you know, the people who I do teach and who will go and run with it, maybe I close a deal with them. Maybe not. And maybe they just go make some money for themselves.

and then they start building their own real estate portfolio. But that’s a good thing too. You know, there’s plenty of opportunity, I think, to go around in this business. So I honestly, I don’t see any qualms in holding back information. kind of just, I let people know what I’m doing, how I do it, if they’re asking, because, you know, there is no one who is in a much

more advanced position than me when I was getting started that I knew who would have helped me out. And I think that would have been super helpful for me. So I think it would be helpful for quite a bit of other people who are getting into the business.

Dylan Silver (22:32.876)
100 % Jeremy, you may have a similar experience to this story I’m about to say, but I had a deal in San Antonio, Texas, which was like an acre and a half of land and a mobile home in Floresville. And I didn’t have the knowledge at the time about contracts and I couldn’t find a note buyer. Now needless to say, if I had a greater network, that deal would have made like $30,000. And so,

after that deal I had to go back into the workforce I had to go I worked for Amazon I worked for Toyota any job that I’m sure I’m missing jobs in there right but it was was right there and that would have been a life-changing deal for me right but not having that kind of mentorship in place and so it’s it’s literally the the the smallest almost like the simplest thing like hey I needed to find a note buyer right that would have done this for me

Jeremy Bourgeois (23:11.429)
Sure.

Jeremy Bourgeois (23:18.97)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (23:30.858)
I didn’t know what that was. didn’t know what that meant. Long story short, the deal the deal didn’t end up happening. And I think it’s interesting that being in these rooms that I put myself into and networking, people are shockingly an open book my previous career, people were not this way. You couldn’t go up to people and ask them for the secret sauce, they’re gonna be tight lipped, you know, and that’s just kind of the way it was. But in this career, I’ve noticed

Jeremy Bourgeois (23:34.393)
Yeah.

Jeremy Bourgeois (23:54.299)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (23:59.56)
Everybody wants for the most part when you go to these events specifically right and people want to share information

Jeremy Bourgeois (24:06.595)
Yeah, absolutely. you know, honestly, I think for the people who are, you know, holding back and not, you know, don’t want to tell someone something because, you know, maybe that person will have the knowledge to go and be their competitor. It’s like, you know, honestly, there’s a lot of information out there. If someone really wants to go figure it out.

You could go to a million different places to go find the information on this stuff. So there’s really no, there’s no sense in holding it back because you can find all a ton of information on bigger pockets on YouTube and Facebook groups. You can just connect with a ton of investors to learn about wholesaling, rental properties, know, fix and flips, whatever, whatever avenue of real estate that you want to get into. Because the reality is it all takes work. So,

you know, if someone’s not willing to put in the work, it’s not really concerned anyways. And if they are, then maybe you partner with them in the future and close a deal together. So.

Dylan Silver (25:09.588)
couldn’t agree anymore. Make make partners you know, if life was a game of monopoly, and you can’t own boardwalk and park place, you want that person to be on your on your team. I don’t know if you’ve played monopoly recently here, Jeremy, but I played monopoly for the first time in like five years recently. And we basically had a team unofficially of me and one of the other people and we’re like, look, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna screw each other over here. We’re gonna maybe

Jeremy Bourgeois (25:21.839)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (25:36.458)
Like if you land on my thing, I’m not gonna force you to pay. We just have to make sure these other two people lose, because we’re far behind. But I digress, I digress. Enough about monopoly arbitrage. We are coming up… It’s a… What is? We are coming up on time here, Jeremy. Where can folks go to get in touch with you?

Jeremy Bourgeois (25:43.301)
Sure. No, you’re right though.

Jeremy Bourgeois (25:55.407)
They can find me at Utah or on Instagram at Utah underscore homebuyer. That is my Instagram handle. Or they can just look me up on Facebook. My full name is Jeremy Bourgeois. It’s kind of a mouthful, but I’m sure you’ll have it written down somewhere. I won’t try spilling it out here. But those are the best places to reach me. I’m always on there and I also have a course on a free course.

on wholesaling or just finding off-market deals in general that you can find by connecting with me on social media as well.

Dylan Silver (26:33.398)
Jeremy, thank you for your time. Thank you for coming on the show.

Jeremy Bourgeois (26:36.975)
Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me on here,